


Light Bends

by redmagexii



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 11:30:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4875106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redmagexii/pseuds/redmagexii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One whispered secret and paradise breaks.</p><p>Laura's perspective.  Set after series 2 episode 30, so spoilers implied.  Buckle up for angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light Bends

It starts with guilt, boiling in the pit of your stomach. You wake up saying the name of a woman you didn’t trust and didn’t like, sweating into your blankets, fresh tears wet against your cheeks.  Your throat catches and your chest hitches.  Your ribs are sore with sobs.

You didn’t trust her and didn’t like her.  She was callous and dangerous, her motivations and justifications slipping through your grasp like smoke.  You didn’t trust her and didn’t like her, were perturbed by her weariness with right and wrong, her glee with chaos and her calculated sense of order; her knowledge of the past, of humankind... of _her_.  You didn’t trust her and didn’t like her, yet you feel sick without her, hopeless and ripped up and empty, because you know just how happy she made someone else.

Goodness and happiness do not stand adjacent the way you thought they did.  They are two separate things, and badness and misery swirl within them.  Everything bleeds together, grey and inky and confusing.  You remember when things were clearer: when you were right by the world’s standards... when you believed that honour became you.  You want to believe those days to be brighter, kinder, home to a better version of yourself – but they aren’t, because what a revoltingly selfish creature the selfless you could be.

So uncompromising.  So cruel.  You chose the darkness, let it love you and promised to love it in return.  You let it run deft, tender hands along your contours and dipped your fingers into its shadows, clutching at its black mane and whispering pleases into its mouth.

You could have loved it back the same, could have understood it the way it understood you, but you didn’t.  Instead you tried to change it, opened every shutter until deadly sunlight seared through its windows.  Your scrutiny was a magnifying glass and you twisted and turned it, slowly and deliberately, to that one, perfect, focused pinpoint. Once you had it, you watched her burn.  You took your beautiful, watchful darkness and shrank her into a corner, shrivelled her and broke her, used your light to try and bend her to your will... and all the while, all the fucking while, you claimed it was for the best.

Was that love?  Was that what love meant?  How did you hold righteousness aloft yet use it to control her?  How could you do that to her?  How did you convince yourself that was okay?

It starts with guilt, boiling in the pit of your stomach.  You need to get it out of you, and the only way to do that is to take the darkness back inside yourself.  You sleep on the couch these days (it’s a wonder the darkness grants you even that) and find your reddened eyes drawn back to the bloodstain on the carpet: the place where the woman you distrusted took her dying breaths.  She looked like an angel with her eyes closed.  How awful that the person you trust least now is yourself.

You push off the blankets.  You rise from the couch on shaking limbs and see her through the curtain, crashed out in bed from yet another night of self-destruction.  She’s been killing again.  You’ve caught sight of her whilst pretending to be asleep, stumbling into the room with blood on her chin.  Sometimes crying, sometimes not.

Sometimes you return and the room smells of sex, and an icy fear of being replaced consumes you before you realise you have no right to jealousy anymore.  A twisted up part of you tells you to leave the webcam on next time and capture the whole sordid show, then watch it over and over again to punish yourself.  This is what you had.  This is what you destroyed.  This is all you deserve.

You move towards her.  Her breathing is even and deep.  You don’t want to wake her because her sleep is so fitful, just like yours, but you need to give her something because you have taken so much.  It has to be now, at three, while the house is still dark and she can’t see your face, the hope you can’t disguise, the eyes she can no longer bear to meet.  It has to be when her defences are down.

You climb into bed beside her.  She lets you.  She is awake now.  You know that: her breathing has changed, become shallower, and you hear a sniff through the blackness as she comes to.  You slide a tentative hand over her waist.  You kiss her and she kisses back on autopilot.  She is half-naked and you need to feel her, need so desperately to meld back into her shadows, so you remove your pyjama shirt, pressing yourself flush up against her.

Flesh to flesh.  You feel complete.  There are no rights in your world anymore but this: the shelter of her arms, the crook of her neck, entangled legs and her lips on yours.  Her hair tickles.  Her cool skin makes you shiver like it always has, yet your hot blood snaps her back to her sensibilities.  She tenses and you feel her remember, feel your ugly shared reality seep back into the corners of her vision.  Your idyllic romance burns at the edges like film catching light.

She inhales sharply as if you have stabbed her through the heart.  “No.”

“Don’t.”

“Laura.”

“Please,” you whisper.  These are more words than you have exchanged in a long while.  You have been stripped of sentences.  Now everything between you is a one-word answer, layered and folded a thousand times to mean everything at once.  You used to talk to her constantly, chatter bloated, pointless nothings just to plug the gaps, yet now you are afraid to talk too much.  Talking would turn whatever this is into a conversation, and she will not entertain conversations with you anymore.

Nonetheless she is pulling away, and you aren’t strong enough to keep hold of her, so you must articulate.  You have to.  You have to give her a reason.  You have to sell yourself back to the woman who loved you.

“Anything,” you choke out.  You want to cry again.  It’s a constant state of being these days: you’re always close, eaten alive by self-pity and self-hatred.  By now your cheeks seem permanently swollen and your skin stings, chapped by salt you’ve rarely the will to wash away.  “Anything you want me to do.”

There is silence.  As soon as the words leave your mouth she changes.  You can feel her change, even in the dark; your senses fire on all cylinders, seeking to catch her every reaction.  She stops resisting and is still.  Her body is harder than you recall, poised and powerful.  She is thinking.

The quiet rings on.  You think it will never end.  It freezes you in place and is so thick you won’t breathe for fear it will drown you.  If it doesn’t kill you then surely _she_ will for daring to cross the gulf between you.  You’re a fool for trying.  You’ll die a fool, right here in her bed.  God, at least you’re in her bed.

Suddenly she is on top of you.  You don’t respond at first. You’re too stunned to move.  She used inhuman speed to pin you and holds you down with unnatural strength.  Her kisses bruise.  Your brain catches up and you finally start to respond, but it’s impossible to match her pace.

This is no act of courtship.  There is fury in her advances.  There are many terrible things she would – and should – say to you, but she is so angry she cannot form the words.  Instead she tells them like this, and it’s hard to think with her straddling your waist, but you guess at them, sure that without her vocabulary you’re coming up short.  She had so many names for you before.  She must have so many more for you now.

Lips desert yours abruptly, dropping to your neck.  She bites into your jugular and you whimper.  It’s too high to cover up.  She wants you to remember this moment of weakness every time you look in the mirror.

She wants the others to know, too.  She wants Danny to see in particular, to prove there is at least one thing Danny cannot take away from her – even when you are only hers to hate.  As if Danny could have you now.  Whenever you talk to her, the blood stain runs wet again, bubbling against the soles of your feet and sliding down the backs of your necks.  It spills from your mouths and coats your hands.  Drip, drip, drip.  Killer, killer, killer.

No.  Danny could never have you now.

She stops for a moment and the first wave of pain envelopes and subsides.  You feel the tight clamp of her teeth, the fangs buried beneath your skin.  You have been penetrated.  It makes you think of the first time you made love, how she paused to let you get used to the sensation, that feeling of being so intimately invaded by someone else.  She had smiled at you so softly, those dark eyes searching yours.  She always was attentive, her gaze almost palpable.  Tactile, too.  Her hands were always on you, touching for the sake of contact.  She had adored you once.

This time, however... you don’t know why she is pausing this time.  Is it regret?  Is it kindness?  You have no idea.  Then it doesn’t matter.  She grabs your hair and tilts your head until your throat is taut.  You wince as her teeth push deeper.  Then she starts to suck.

The pressure is surreal.  Your mind battles to understand it, to connect the experience with any other, but it can’t.  The only other time she bit you was before Christmas.  It lasted only a moment, no longer than the shock and the first, sharp pain.  This time she really, really means it.  She drinks from you deeply, slowly.  You are being drained, milked almost, and her grip on you tightens.

Fight or flight kicks in.  You feel your limbs strain against her; you know you’d have shoved her off if she wasn’t so strong.  Black spots float before your eyes, darker than the ceiling.  Your heart panics, pumping harder, and her grip tightens further, her other arm curling around you, lifting you to her mouth as your blood rushes.  Instinct and emotion clash violently.  You want to stop her.  You want to let her.  You don’t know what you want.

She tears back and the air hits your wounds.  The punctures sting in stereo.  Feverish, you draw them in your mind’s eye.  She kisses you again, roughly, and you taste your own blood on her tongue.  Your head hurts.  You are dizzy with blood loss.  You remember picking scabs in childhood, the coppery flavour of the graze beneath.

Is this not another scab you have picked?

She shifts her weight and tugs at your pyjama bottoms.  You oblige, and when they are gone she is immediately back over you, working quickly.  She knows as well as you do this must be done before dawn.  She won’t take off her own underwear.  It frustrates you but you’ve no right to expect that.  Nakedness is vulnerability.  She will no longer be vulnerable for you.

She parts your legs and her fingers push into you.  It hurts.  During the few weeks you made love, she never hurt you once.  You know it’s deliberate, that she wants to hurt you.  It’s fine: you want her to hurt you, too, and it’s not long before the pain lessens, becomes something else.  It has been so long since she was inside you; the very fact that it’s her is enough to make you wet.

She wraps your leg around her to brace you both.  You hold onto her as you move together, your heel digging against the small of her back.  Oh God, she’s fucking you.  With every split-second withdrawal of her digits you feel the earth fall out from under you, feel emptier than you have ever felt in your life, and when she slides back in you are full to breaking point.  The contrast throws you.  The blood loss makes you high.  Your head pounds in sync to her thrusts like she’s timing it.  You can’t think.

She lowers herself for leverage and you can’t help but reach out for her.  You wrap your arms around her shoulders, dragging your nails down her back.  To your surprise she doesn’t stop you, only fucks you harder.

Pressure builds quickly.  You come, you can’t help it, but she keeps going.  She doesn’t want it to be about pleasing you.  She wants it to be about taking, and you did want her to take what she needed.  You don’t mind: it delays the inevitable, doesn’t it?  The moment where she lets you go once and for all.  The long stretch of eternity where she never touches you again.

You come a second time.  She doesn’t stop.  The air is cold.  The walls watch.  In the place of giggles and squeals is panting, occasionally split open by a cry of pain you hope nobody else hears.  You know why she’s doing it.  It’s the same reason you’re not blissful and sleepy the way you should be by now: you can’t satisfy each other the way you could before.  You can’t sate her because you cut her heart out.  She can’t sate you because you know you cut her heart out.  One whispered secret and paradise breaks.

Finally she is finished with you.  She withdraws her fingers and all but collapses in your arms with exhaustion.  Your thighs are at her waist, fitted between her hips and her ribcage.  Her head is on your chest.  Absentmindedly you run your fingers through her hair.

You fit perfectly together.

She indulges you until she has caught her breath, then moves.  You don’t know what to expect and you’re too drained to pre-empt her, so you wait for her to decide what she wants.  You curl up on your side, facing away from her.  Alert.  Afraid.  Praying for the dark.

Then it happens.  The thing you want.  She pulls you against her, your back to her front, and holds you close, burying her face into your neck.  She plants her lips against your nape and a jolt runs up your spine like she has electrocuted you.

For a few minutes, maybe ten, maybe twenty, you just lie together, yin-yanged outside of reality.  You won’t sleep.  You refuse to.  You focus on counting her breaths, feeling her chest rise and fall.  Her arm is around you.  Her hand toys with your hair.  Mundane, beautiful things, all of them proof of her existence… that she is really here with you.  You will not miss these minutes, however ambiguous, however devoid of context they may be.  They mean too much.

Eventually, she stirs.  The muscles in her stomach flex ever so slightly as she adjusts her position.  Her mouth finds the shell of your ear.  When she speaks, you feel it: her voice vibrates through your body and hot air prickles against your skin.  You almost shiver.

“Laura.”

“Carm?”

You could have said plenty of things.  Yeses and whats and don’ts.  Perhaps a thank you would have been apt: she let you atone, after all.  You could have spilled out a thousand apologies, begging and pleading for her forgiveness.  You may even have risked another please.  Instead, you said her name.  It paints an illusion, a singular instance in time where you can pretend you didn’t hurt her.  She may never let you call her that again.

“Get out.”

Your blood runs cold.  The rejection is everything you knew it would be.  It rips you from throat to sternum, guts you where you lie.  Yet you knew it was coming, so you sit up.

Tears well.  You don’t let her see them.  You stand with more grace than you ever expected of yourself in this state, a bent-up silhouette in the murky pre-dawn light.  You’re sore inside.  Your wrists and thighs hurt; you suspect she has bruised them.  Your head is killing you.  Your throat pounds, sticky and crusted where the blood has dried.  You collect your pyjamas.  You leave without a word.

Back on the sofa, you listen for her.  You listen for your name, for another invitation, for another chance to make her happy.  You hear nothing: the silence is as empty as you are.

Some part of you is actually disappointed.  You curse yourself.  Perhaps the real hungry light is you, always demanding more than you should... always wanting, on and on and on and on and on.


End file.
